"You mean you don't take any infomins at all? Like, not even a daily mental health supplement? How do you even function?"

"The old fashioned way, I suppose."

"What? Like you read newspapers or something?"

"Don't be ridiculous. There's sites you can go to where people still write about what's going on. Where they talk about what they see in the world."

"Really? Don't they have anything better to do?"

"It's surprisingly useful. You should try it sometime."

"Reading a newspaper?"

"No. Writing down what you see."

"Oh. My. God. You're a Ludder aren't you?"

"I didn't say that. I just don't like taking infomins."

"Is it because of the new yellow pills? They are kinda big. I heard you can get a shot, if you have trouble swallowing..."

"No. I don't like getting all my information from pills."

"But how else do you keep up? How do you know what's happening? You can't possibly keep track of everything going on. For all you know, you're completely ignorant of some major event or new thing...or what if you are only learning about negative things -- that's how you get depressed. You gotta at least take a mental health supplement. Get a nice balance of good news and optimistic things..."

"You don't think you can get that just by living. Doing things. Talking to people? How do you imagine people survived before infomins?"

"They didn't. They probably moped around and felt like shit -- that is, that's what they did when they weren't slaughtering each other and being generally nasty. Have you read any history? Humans were psychos before infomins."

"Is that something you got to know from a pill?"

"Dude, your informational diet is a disaster. Don't even try to get high and mighty with me."

Julia doesn't want to get out of bed. She feels especially tired today and tells herself she can sleep a little longer as she taps her phone to stop the alarm. Of course, she felt she was especially tired yesterday, too. Ended up being thirty minutes late to work. That feeling gives her a jolt of adrenaline and now her eyes are open and she knows she won't stay in bed any longer.

Getting up, she walks down the hall to the bathroom. Opens the cabinet: takes down her daily pill box. Seven pills today. Two purples, three yellows, a green, and a pink. Are the yellow ones her women's daily vitamin or is that the purples? The purples are anxiety meds, so yellow must be women's daily...but three? that seems like a lot. Then she remembers that the green is her daily vitamin and the yellows are her infomins. She had forgotten that they had recently upped the dose. That's why she was confused.

She downs the pills in two separate handfuls, keeping them in her mouth until it feels like she can swallow. The feeling always scares her: what if they start dissolving in her mouth? She has some vague childhood memory of not being able to swallow a pill and suddenly tasting it in her mouth. Grainy. Bitter.

She doesn't even notice the slow, cold spreading feeling in her brain. All information in the pills suddenly becoming available to her mind -- well, not all of it. She heard that most minds couldn't take in as much as was in the pills. Really, she probably only was absorbing half the info in each pill. Oh well, insurance covered them anyways.

"We're very excited to have you joinning the team! We're doing some pretty cutting edge stuff in the food sciences business. Some people say that MexiNexi is just another fast food taco bar, but we like to think that we're inventing an entirely new cuisine: need I say more than Mac 'n Cheesarito? In order to get you up to speed, I'm going to get you a prescription for a course of our corporate infomins. You might find them a little strong, but it's really the best way to make sure you're on the same page with the department here. We've had a few new hires lately who told us the information density was too high but it wasn't anything serious -- they just had to rest up for a few days, so if you need to take a day or two to stay at home and rest while you're doing the course, don't worry at all. Just tell Frida in HR that you're bitsick."

Something had gone wrong with the school's cafeteria shipments this week. Monday they didn't have any chicken for the chicken salad and they had to send Fred to the nearest store to buy all the Vienna sausages he could find. If that wasn't bad enough, on Tuesday, there weren't enough infomins for all the children. Addy made this discovery when she was setting up all their little pill cups. She ran out of pills when there were still 20 or 30 cups left.

At first, she thought she must have miscounted. But she double checked twice and there was no question: they were missing infomins. This had never happened before and she wasn't sure at all what she should do, so she went and asked the cafeteria manager, Jake. He didn't seem to have any idea what to do either, and so both of them ended up in Principal McClellen's office.

Principal McClellen had been in schools since before Addy or even Jake was born and she had seen it all. True to form, she didn't bat an eye and told them that the protocol was that if there wasn't enough infomins for all the children, none of the children would take them. They would have to add a makeup day to the end of the school year, but that's just the way things were.

When Addy asked why they couldn't just give out the infomins they did have, Principal McClellen explained that it wouldn't be fair because the children who did get infomins might use the knowledge to trick or play jokes on the other kids and they'd likely have an uproar on their hands. She'd seen it once before.

Addy ended up dumping them in the cafeteria waste bin and having Fred take them out to the dumpster before lunch started.

"Are you tired of being afraid?"

"Do you cringe when you walk down the street?"

"Is your girl ashamed of you?"

"Do you want to have the confidence of a badass mother -beep- er?"

"You need Black Cat Self Defense infomins! Full courses in krav-maga, muay thai boxing, karate, judo, and much more!

"The confidence you've always wanted is just a pill away!"

"People used to make fun of learning things from books. Booklearning was actually a pejorative."

"Did you get that from one of your pills?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. You should try them sometime, you might actually learn a thing or two."

"I have tried them! What kind of childhood do you think I had?"

"I don't know, I just don't get where all this conspiracy stuff is coming from. They're just infomins."

"Do you even know what they put in them? Do you ever check?"

"They have labels. You can scan them and get a whole list of everything if you want."

"Have you ever done it?"

"No."

"It doesn't even matter. How do you know that they're choosing what's actually important for you to know about? How do you know they aren't hiding information from you...or tricking you?"

"There's laws against that, man! It's like you think we live in anarchy or something. There's like a whole federal bureaucracy that regulates what can go in infomins and do you know what kind of penalties they have for putting false information in them? I think it's like life in prison or something. At least it's a massive fine."

"What brand do you take?"

"That's another thing! There's like a ton of different brands. If you don't like the infomins you're taking, just switch brands. Are you telling me they're all in cahoots or something? You're being ridiculous!"

"I just think you can't get information...you can't really know about things from a pill. There's something important about experience and...you know...doing a thing. It's like trying to survive on vitamins and protein shakes...maybe your body needs the chewing to make it all work."

"Oh my god, you don't like vitamins? What's next: you think clean drinking water is bad?"